Shannon Costello

Good communication is essential to a healthy relationship.  In order for good communication to occur each party must actively work to reach out to the other parties.  Good communication is difficult with two persons.  My guess is that the difficulty level increases significantly as the number of persons involved increases.

Consider the group made up of a student, his teacher, and his parent.  Ideally, the student would regularly inform his parent of his progress in school, including successes and failures.  In the event of a problem in the classroom, the student would communicate with the teacher and report the sum of that communication to his parent, seeking to accurately portray what happened and what was said.

The teacher would regularly inform parents of the student’s progress.  The teacher would have a plan for communicating with parents, including a listing of ways to contact the parents, a place from which to contact parents, and time set aside for the purpose of communicating.  The teacher would also have a plan for when to communicate, for example, in the case of breakdowns in the normal communication patterns or problems in the classroom.  Communication would take place in a timely fashion.

The parent would regularly seek out academic information from the student, both verbal and written.  The parent would be informed of and use the methods of communication implemented by the school.  The parent would seek to open lines of communication before there was a problem.  In the event of a problem the parent would contact the teacher.

Of course this is very different from what actually happens.  Each of the parties involved may have very different goals.  A typical student goal is to get grades that are good enough to keep the parents happy.  A typical parent goal is for the student to get good grades.  My goal is for the student to learn.  In addition, parties frequently do not reach out.  Students in fact avoid regular communication, especially if the news is bad.  In the event of a problem they may not communicate with the teacher.  Failure to report the entire story is common.

Teachers are good at communicating regularly to the students, but they are not good enough to compensate for the near total breakdown that often ocurrs between a student and parent.  The lack of time is a tremendously limiting factor, as is the number of students.

Parents are often poorly prepared for these communication breakdowns.  They depend on the student, and if that link fails they expect the teacher to fill them in.  Parents often do not seem aware of the mass communication avenues that a school establishes, for example, teacher homework websites and school newsletters.  The typical middle parent also works full-time, something which does not leave lots of energy for checking the homework websites of the student’s math, English, Spanish, history, reading, and science teachers.

And so it is that the teaching professional finds herself in a very sticky situation.